Ownership Boundary

Foundation owns low-volatility contracts whose meaning must remain identical across product packages. It provides representation, identity, provenance, compatibility, and portable outcomes without interpreting scientific evidence or controlling work.

flowchart TB
    F["Foundation contracts"] --> C["Core"]
    F --> R["Runtime"]
    F --> K["Knowledge"]
    F --> I["Intelligence"]
    F --> L["Lab"]
    C -. "no reverse import" .-> F
    R -. "no reverse import" .-> F

Owned Contracts

Surface	Foundation authority
identifiers	constrained types, stable prefixes, construction and classification
JSON models	strict validation and portable serialization behavior
document metadata	producer, schema, lifecycle, revision, lineage, and content identity
canonical values and hashes	deterministic representation under a named policy
provenance	shared source and derivation primitives
compatibility	schema versions, assessments, migration paths, deprecation
outcomes	refusals, error envelopes, exceptions, and portable dispositions

Refused Ownership

Foundation does not own scientific parsers, algorithms, benchmarks, run state, providers, evidence truth, recommendation policy, assay feasibility, or repository automation. It may define a portable field used by those concerns; the consuming package owns what that field means in its domain decision.

Placement Test

Keep a change here only when multiple canonical packages require the same meaning and a downstream owner would create reverse dependency or semantic forking. Move it downstream when the rule depends on workflow family, scientific method, execution state, evidence interpretation, decision posture, or laboratory consequence.

Shared use alone is insufficient. A helper used in several packages can still belong to the package whose decision it implements.

Stability Burden

Foundation changes have repository-wide compatibility radius. Review public imports, schemas, canonical bytes, hashes, migrations, old artifacts, and every affected consumer together. A locally tidy abstraction is unacceptable when it forces downstream packages to reinterpret an existing durable contract.